The definitive Dylan Rewind, 2020 offers the most ambitious Dylan Rewind experience there is. With through the roof aspirations, I began brainstorming in August, thinking about how to capture such an unprecedented year. I thought, "how about a horror movie?"
Dylan Rewind 2020's cold open has no music, and reveals the opening credits quietly, with the only audio being footsteps, rumbling, and Dylan yelling. It sets up the rest of the story in a way that leaves the viewer concerned and intrigued for what's to come.
Influenced heavily by Interstellar, the story revolves around Dylan losing the Dylan Rewind disc on New Year's Eve after being chased by a monster with similar qualities to the Coronavirus renderings. He then falls into a sinkhole in the hallway, where he finds his friends falling endlessly. Eventually, the group reaches a purgatory-like space where they witness different events from the year in the form of clips, through which they can affect gravity through the past. Dylan finds a clip of his past self from the opening, and steals the disc from his past self, creating the sinkhole and a time loop in the process.
The metaphor is not subtle, where the "monster" represents the COVID-19 pandemic, which chases the friends into a dark "hole", representing quarantine. Then, after exiting the hole via the limbo space, quarantine ends and they return to life as normal (or close to it). This metaphor makes sense diagetically, as well as given the scenes' placement in the video, with the hole scenes taking place around the quarantine montage sections, and then exiting the hole before the new school year.
Undoubtedly the most iconic part of Dylan Rewind 2020, is its choreographed ending. Filmed on the same stage as my drama productions, I choreographed the ending, taking unconscious influence from the official Snow Halation music video. Ending with the classic Dylan Rewind Rockerfeller Street dance, this dance segment was planned from the beginning, and took over two hours to film, and it ws a miracle that the final take was as good as it was.
Dylan Rewind 2020 started conceptual production in August, with actual work beginning in September. Filming began in November, wrapped in mid-December, and was not finalized until late December, only a few days before its premiere.
Dylan Rewind 2020 is loaded with series firsts. It is the first Dylan Rewind in 4K, the first to have a trailer, the first to have a cohesive story, the first to have credits, and the first Dylan Rewind to have a script, with an actual production process. It started the series traditions of premiering on YouTube on Christmas Day, and having a choreographed dance segment as the ending.
Dylan Rewind 2019 was started in October, a two-month increase in production time over 2018.
Songs Used:
History Maker - DEAN FUJIOKA
Haggstrom x White Ferrari - Silvagunner
Day One - Hanz Zimmer
Claire De Lune - Debussy
Snow Halation Mega Remix
Just the Two of Us - Fanfare Ciocarlia